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A map showing approximate areas of various Mississippian and related cultures (c. 800-1500 CE) This is a list of Mississippian sites. The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American culture that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, inland-Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1500 CE, varying regionally. [1]
The culture was expressed in villages and chiefdoms throughout the central Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and most of the Mid-South area, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi as the core of the classic Mississippian culture area. [4] The park contains a museum and an archaeological laboratory.
Established about AD 1000, Joara was the largest Mississippian-culture settlement within the current boundaries of North Carolina. [3] In 1540 a party of Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto recorded encountering the people at this chiefdom site. [2] De Soto's 1540 expedition also noted the Chalaque people in the area near Joara.
The Mississippian period is the chronological stage, while Mississippian culture refers to the cultural similarities that characterize this society. The Early Mississippian period ( c. 1000 –1200) had just transitioned from the Late Woodland period way of life (500–1000).
The site was built and occupied between 1000 and 1500 by people of the Fort Walton culture, the southernmost expression of the Mississippian culture.The scale of the site and the number and size of the mounds indicate that this was the site of a regional chiefdom, and was thus a political and religious center. [2]
The period between first contact of the traditional chiefdoms with the Europeans in 1540 until the demise of the Mississippian culture in 1730 is called a "shatter zone" by scholars. [ 3 ] The Mississippian people numbered about 500,000 at the time of first contact with Europeans in 1540.
Archaeologists theorize that by 1450 CE with the collapse of the Angel chiefdom, many of the Angel people had relocated downriver to the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash rivers. A new Late Mississippian cultural group subsequently emerged and are known as the Caborn-Welborn culture. [5]
Mississippian culture spread along the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries between the 9th and 16th centuries. The largest Mississippian settlement was Cahokia, the capital of a major chiefdom that built a six-mile-square city east of the Mississippi River that now is St. Louis, Missouri, in present-day southern Illinois.